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9 11
The Flawed—and Deadly—'War on Terror' Mindset Endures in Israel
If Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide of the Palestinians has revealed anything about the power of discourse, it’s that the war on terror narrative has proven to be remarkably enduring.
Jan 27, 2024
In a New Yorker piece published five days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, American critic and public intellectual Susan Sontag wrote, “Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen.” Sontag’s desire to contextualize the 9/11 attacks was an instant challenge to the narratives that President George W. Bush would soon deploy, painting the United States as a country of peace and, most importantly, innocent of any wrongdoing. While the rhetorical strategies he developed to justify what came to be known as the Global War on Terror have continued to this day, they were not only eagerly embraced by Israel in 2001, they also lie at the heart of that country’s justification of the genocidal campaign that’s been waged against the Palestinian people since October 7, 2023.
On September 20, 2001, President Bush delivered a speech to Congress in which he shared a carefully constructed storyline that would justify endless war. The United States, he said, was attacked because the terrorists “hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” In that official response to the 9/11 attacks, he also used the phrase “war on terror” for the first time, stating (all too ominously in retrospect): “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”
“Americans are asking,” he went on, “why do they hate us?” And then he provided a framework for understanding the motives of the “terrorists” precluding the possibility that American actions prior to 9/11 could in any way have explained the attacks. In other words, he positioned his country as a blameless victim, shoved without warning into a “post-9/11 world.” As Bush put it, “All of this was brought upon us in a single day — and night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.” As scholar Richard Jackson later noted, the president’s use of “our war on terror” constituted “a very carefully and deliberately constructed public discourse… specifically designed to make the war seem reasonable, responsible, and inherently ‘good.’”
Your Fight Is Our Fight
The day after the 9/11 attacks, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gave a televised address to Israelis, saying that “the fight against terrorism is an international struggle of the free world against the forces of darkness who seek to destroy our liberty and way of life. Together, we can defeat these forces of evil.” Sharon, in other words, laid out Israel’s fight in the same binary terms the American president would soon use, a good-versus-evil framework, as a way of rejecting any alternative explanations of those assaults on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York City that killed almost 3,000 people. That December, Sharon responded to an attack in Jerusalem by two Palestinian suicide bombers by saying that he would launch his own “war on terror… with all the means at our disposal.”
On the day of Bush’s September 20th speech, Benjamin Netanyahu, then working in the private sector after holding various positions within the Israeli government, capitalized on the president’s narrative by asserting Israel’s enthusiastic support for the United States. In a statement offered to the House Government Reform Committee, emphasizing his country’s commitment to fighting terrorism, Netanyahu stated, “I am certain that I speak on behalf of my entire nation when I say today, we are all Americans — in grief, as in defiance.”
Israel’s “9/11”
Just as the 9/11 attacks “did not speak for themselves,” neither did Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023. In remarks at a bilateral meeting with President Biden 11 days later, however, Prime Minister Netanyahu strategically compared the Hamas attacks to the 9/11 ones, using resonant terms for Americans that also allowed Israel to claim its own total innocence, as the U.S. had done 22 years earlier. In that vein, Netanyahu stated, “On October 7th, Hamas murdered 1,400 Israelis, maybe more. This is in a country of fewer than 10 million people. This would be equivalent to over 50,000 Americans murdered in a single day. That’s 20 9/11s. That is why October 7th is another day that will live in infamy.”
But 9/11 doesn’t live in infamy because it actually caused damage of any long-lasting or ultimate sort to the United States or because it far exceeded the scale of other acts of global mass violence, but because it involved “Americans as the victims of terror, not as the perpetrators” and because of the way those leading the country portrayed it as uniquely and exceptionally victimized. As Professor Jackson put it, 9/11 “was immediately iconicized as the foremost symbol of American suffering.” The ability to reproduce that narrative endlessly, while transforming 9/11 into a date that transcended time itself, served as a powerful lesson to Israel in how to communicate suffering and an omnipresent existential threat that could be weaponized to legitimize future violent interventions. By framing the Hamas attacks on October 7th similarly as a symbol of ultimate suffering and existential threat, Israel could do the same.
Giving Israel further license for unfettered state violence under the guise of a war on terror, in remarks in Tel Aviv President Biden stated that “since this terrorist attack… took place, we have seen it described as Israel’s 9/11. But for a nation the size of Israel, it was like 15 9/11s. The scale may be different, but I’m sure those horrors have tapped into… some kind of primal feeling in Israel, just like it did and felt in the United States.”
It bears noting that while Israel quickly deployed the rhetoric of the War on Terror on and after October 7th, weaponizing the language of terror was not in and of itself novel in that country. For example, in 1986, Benjamin Netanyahu edited and contributed to a collection of essays called Terrorism: How the West Can Win that spoke to themes similar to those woven into the U.S. war on terror narrative. However, in responding to Hamas’s attacks, Israel’s discursive strategy was both to capitalize on and tether itself to the meanings the U.S. had popularized and made pervasive about the 9/11 attacks.
“Surprise” Attacks
The power of that “primal feeling” was intensified by the way both the United States and Israel feigned “surprise” about their countries being targeted, despite evidence of impending threats both were privy to. That evidence included a President’s Daily Brief that Bush received on August 6, 2001, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US,” and the possession by Israeli officials of a Hamas battle plan document detailing the potential attack a year in advance.
Just as Bush referred to the 9/11 attacks as a surprise, despite several years of conflict with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden (who clearly stated that U.S. violence in Muslim-majority countries was the motivation for the attacks), Netanyahu claimed the same after the Hamas attacks, ignoring Israel’s longtime chokehold on Gaza (and Palestinian areas of the West Bank). Addressing Israeli citizens on the day of the attack, Netanyahu asserted that “we are at war, not in an operation or in rounds, but at war. This morning, Hamas launched a murderous surprise attack against the State of Israel and its citizens.”
By portraying terrorism as a grave, unparalleled, and unpredictable danger, both the United States and Israel framed their brutal wars and over-responses as necessary actions. Even more problematically, both tried to evade accountability for future acts by characterizing themselves as coerced into the wars they then launched. Netanyahu typically asserted on October 30th that, “since October 7th, Israel has been at war. Israel did not start this war. Israel did not want this war. But Israel will win this war.”
All of these tactics are meant to create and perpetuate “an extremely narrow set of ‘political truths’” (or untruths, if you prefer). Whether ingrained in the public consciousness by the United States or Israel, such “truths” were meant to dictate just who the “terrorists” were (never us, of course), their irrational, barbaric, uncivilized nature, and so, why intervention — full-scale war, in fact — was necessary. An additional rhetorical goal was to position the dominant narrative, whether American or Israeli, as a “natural interpretation” of reality, not a constructed one.
Israel has relied on such a framework to consistently peddle a depoliticized narrative of Hamas, which roots any violence committed in a fundamental and irrational opposition to the state of Israel and inherent hatred of the Jewish people as opposed to the longstanding regime of occupation, apartheid, and now genocide of Palestinians. Hamas and other non-state actors are, of course, always portrayed as “driven by fanaticism,” as Scott Poynting and David Whyte note, while state violence, in contrast, is “presented as defensive, responsible, rational, and unavoidable — and not motivated by a particular ideological bias or political choice.”
The Threat of Terrorism and Moral Equivalencies
Terrorist violence in these years has regularly been weaponized in the service of state violence by conceiving of its threat as almost unimaginably dangerous. Both the United States and Israel have represented terrorism as “catastrophic to democracy, freedom, civilization and the American [or Israeli] way of life,” and “a threat commensurate with Nazism and Communism.”
As with Bush’s argument that the 9/11 attackers were the “heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century” and that “they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism,” Netanyahu urged a mobilization of countries across the world to eliminate Hamas on a similar basis. To this end, he asserted that “just as the civilized world united to defeat the Nazis and united to defeat ISIS, the civilized world must unite to defeat Hamas.”
American officials regularly frame U.S. violence as a function of the country’s inherent goodness and superiority. For example, in September 2006, responding to criticisms of the moral basis for the War on Terror, Bush said at a press conference: “If there’s any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it’s flawed logic… I simply can’t accept that. It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.”
By the time Bush made those remarks, the invasions of and wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as other “counterterrorism” operations across the globe, had been underway for years. Given the staggering number of civilians already killed, drawing a demarcation line between the United States and “Islamic extremists” based on the slaughter of innocent women and children should hardly have been possible (though when it came to those killed by Americans, the term of the time was the all-too-dehumanizing “collateral damage”).
No stranger to weaponizing the language of moral equivalencies, Netanyahu has repeatedly highlighted the victims of Hamas’s attacks in order to distinguish them from Israel’s. For example, he described Hamas as “an enemy that murders children and mothers in their homes, in their beds. An enemy that kidnaps the elderly, kids, youths. Murderers who massacre and slaughter our citizens, our kids, who just wanted to have fun on the holiday.” But like the United States, Israel has killed women and children on a strikingly greater scale than the non-state actors they were comparing their violence to. In fact, in the last 100 days of Israel’s war, it is believed to have killed more than 10,000 children (and those figures will only rise if you include children who are now likely to die from starvation and disease in a devastated Gaza).
Birds of Violent Rhetorical Feathers Flock Together
In a White House briefing a week after the Hamas attacks, Biden said, “These guys — they make al-Qaeda look pure. They’re pure — they’re pure evil.” Then, nearly three weeks after those October 7th attacks, in a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, Netanyahu asserted that his country was in “a battle” with “the Axis of Evil led by Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, and their minions.” More than two decades earlier, President George W. Bush had uttered similar words, referring to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil,” who were “arming to threaten the peace of the world.”
In each case, the “evil” they were referring to was meant to communicate an inherent and innate desire for violence and destruction, irrespective of the actions of the United States or Israel. As the saying goes, evil is as evil does.
As scholar Joanne Esch has noted, “If they hate us for who we are rather than what we do, nothing can be gained from reexamining our own policies.” In other words, no matter what we do, the United States and Israel can insist on a level of moral superiority in taking on such battles as the harbingers of good. And it was true that, positioned as a battle of good versus evil, the all-American war on terror did, for a time, gain a kind of “divine sanction,” which Israel has used as a blueprint.
In response to the recent International Court of Justice complaint submitted by South Africa charging Israel with genocide, a defiant Prime Minister Netanyahu tweeted that his country would continue its Gazan war until it was over. He also mentioned a meeting he had with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in which he told him, “This is not just our war — it is also your war.”
If Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide of the Palestinians has revealed anything about the power of discourse, it’s that the war on terror narrative has proven to be remarkably enduring. This has enabled both states to make use of specific schemas that were constructed and deployed in Washington to explain the 9/11 attacks — and now to justify a genocidal war in a world where “terror” is seen as an eternal threat to “liberal democracies.”
In his book Narrative and the Making of US National Security, Donald Krebs argues that, when it comes to politics, language “neither competes with nor complements power politics: it is power politics.” In this vein, it remains critical to subvert such destructive and pervasive narratives so that countries like the United States and Israel can no longer maintain “necropolitical” rule domestically or globally — that is, in the words of Cameroon historian and political theorist Achille Mmembe, “the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”
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Endless War and the American 'Ghost Budget' That Pays for It
Prior to 2001, U.S. wars were financed through a mixture of higher taxes and budget cuts, and funded mostly through the regular defense budget. The post-9/11 war funding pattern was completely different.
Jan 07, 2024
The post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were enabled by a historically unprecedented combination of budgetary procedures and financing methods. Unlike all previous U.S. wars, the post-9/11 wars were funded without higher taxes or non-war budget cuts, and through a separate budget. This set of circumstances – one that I have termed the “Ghost Budget” – enabled successive administrations to prosecute the wars with limited congressional oversight and minimal transparency and public debate. I adopted the name “Ghost Budget” because the term “ghost” appeared frequently in post-9/11 government reports in reference to funds allocated to people, places, or projects that turned out to be phantoms.
The Ghost Budget was the result of an interplay between changes in the U.S. budgetary process, a more assertive military establishment, and the conditions in global capital markets. It has had far-reaching implications for the conduct and course of the post-9/11 wars and for defense policy today.
Funding the Post-9/11 Wars
The “Ghost Budget” was the biggest budgetary anomaly in U.S. history. Prior to 9/11, U.S. wars were financed through a mixture of higher taxes and budget cuts, and funded mostly through the regular defense budget. One third of the costs of World War I and half the costs of World War II were met through higher taxes. During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt described paying taxes as a “patriotic duty” as he raised taxes on business, imposed a “wealth tax,” raised inheritance taxes, and expanded the number of income taxpayers to roughly 80 percent of the workforce by 1945. Wars in Korea and Vietnam largely followed a similar pattern, with President Harry Truman pledging to make the country “pay as you go” for the Korean War. War funding was also a central issue in the Vietnam War, which ended when Congress refused to appropriate money for the South Vietnamese military.
The post-9/11 war funding pattern was completely different. For the first time since the American Revolutionary War, war costs were covered almost entirely by debt. There were no wartime tax increases or cuts in spending. Quite the reverse: far from demanding sacrifices, President George W. Bush slashed federal taxes in 2001 and again in 2003, just as the United States invaded Iraq. President Donald Trump reduced taxes further in 2017. Overall, federal taxes declined from 18.8 percent of GDP in 2001 to 16.2 percent by the start of 2020. In the same period, outstanding federal debt held by the public rose from $3.5 trillion to $20 trillion. War spending contributed at least $2.2 trillion to this increase.
Not only was the financing strategy unprecedented, but the budgetary mechanism used to approve the vast post-9/11 wartime spending also diverged radically from the past. In all previous conflicts, the United States paid for wars as part of its regular defense appropriations (the defense “base budget”), after the initial period (1-2 years) of supplemental “emergency” funding bills. By contrast, for the entire decade from FY 2001 to FY 2011, Congress paid for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as “emergencies,” devoid of serious legislative or executive oversight.
By statute, emergency spending is defined as “unanticipated…sudden…urgent…unforeseen…and temporary” and is typically reserved for one-off crises such as floods and hurricanes. Such emergency spending measures are exempt from regular procedural rules in Congress because the intent is to disburse money quickly in situations where delay would be harmful.
Congress continued to enact “emergency supplemental” funding even as the war effort expanded. The United States sent 130,000 military personnel into Iraq in 2003 (alongside troops from more than 30 countries). By 2009, there were 187,200 U.S. “boots on the ground” in Iraq and Afghanistan, supported by a similar number of military contractors, with nearly 500 U.S. military bases set up across Iraq, but the conflict was still being paid for as an “emergency.” In FY 2012, President Obama renamed the “Global War on Terror” as “Overseas Contingency Operations” (OCO) but the war continued to be funded using money that – although not designated as “emergency” – was explicitly exempted from regular spending limits on other government spending programs.
How We Got Here
There were three primary drivers of the Ghost Budget: unusual economic conditions, congressional budget dysfunction, and military assertiveness.
Economic Conditions: Unlike earlier wars, the post 9/11 conflicts took place in an era of free-flowing international capital markets. That provided the U.S. Treasury with access to a deep and global pool of capital, making it easy to borrow large amounts without negatively affecting the cost. It was also a period of historically low interest rates. Real interest rates (nominal rate minus inflation) on 10-year Treasury bonds fell from 3.4% at the start of 2001 to negative (-0.4%) by early 2021 — a 40-year low. Consequently, the Treasury was able to borrow trillions of dollars to pay for the wars, and simultaneously finance the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 without having any material effect on the amount of debt service being repaid through the annual budget. By FY 2017, total public debt had more than tripled, but debt service payments as a percentage of annual budget outlays had decreased to 6.6 percent, compared to 8.5 percent of federal budget outlays in FY 2002. In terms of cash outlays, this meant that the United States paid only slightly more in interest payments in FY 2017 than it had in FY 2002 ($268 billion versus $232 billion in 2018 dollars). Borrowing seemed virtually painless.
Budget Dysfunction: For several decades, the federal budget process has become increasingly dysfunctional. This breakdown may be traced to the post-Watergate budget reforms enacted in 1974, which shifted power away from the President and to the Congress. Most budget experts from both parties agree that the reforms made the budget process weaker, less predictable, less capable of reconciling competing demands, and more prone to fiscal crises. Prior to 1974, the federal government had never ceased operations for lack of funding. Since then, it has “shut down” 22 times, completely or partially. There have been only four years in which Congress passed its annual appropriations bills on time, and a series of near-defaults and other fiscal crises. In the absence of reliable budgets, Congress has enacted hundreds of short-term stopgap “continuing resolutions” to pay the bills. In this context, it was convenient for all the stakeholders to fund the wars as an“emergency” outside the regular process. The President was able to exclude war funding from his annual defense budget request to Congress, thus presenting an artificially low number for the federal budget deficit. This helped the Bush administration sustain the pretense that the wars would be short, while pursuing its political agenda of cutting taxes. Meanwhile, Congress was freed from the need to find politically painful spending cuts elsewhere to pay for the war, and the Pentagon was able to prosecute the wars without worrying about whether Congress would pass the defense appropriations bills on time.
Military Assertiveness: In 2001, the Pentagon was actively seeking to increase its budget after a decade of post-cold war budget cuts. The Afghanistan and Iraq conflict not only reversed the downward trend in military spending, but opened the floodgates to a spending bonanza due to the nature of emergency and OCO appropriations. Unlike the regular defense base budget, the wartime supplemental money was easier to secure, had few restrictions on how it could be spent, and avoided the lengthy internal Planning, Programming, Budgeting & Execution Process (PPBE) budget justification process. Consequently, the Defense Department was able to shift war funding into other categories to obtain items on its long-time “wish list” that were only tangentially (or not at all) related to the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates termed this a “culture of endless money” inside the Pentagon.
By 2009, war spending accounted for almost one quarter of the total military budget; the Pentagon budget had grown to its highest level since the Second World War, and military spending had rebounded from 2.9% of GDP in FY 2001 to above 4% of GDP, where it remained through FY 2019. The OCO budget had evolved into a second defense budget that was largely untethered from the wars, and protected the military from congressional budget volatility.
Implications for Perpetual War
The Ghost Budget provided the ability to keep borrowing and spending in an almost unconstrained manner for more than two decades. The absence of new taxes insulated the public from the mounting cost of the wars and broke the expectation that wars would inevitably involve higher taxes. The OCO budget extended far beyond the immediate operational needs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, perpetuating military actions throughout the region. As Immanuel Kant predicted in Perpetual Peace (1795), the ability to keep borrowing and spending with minimal oversight allowed the United States to keep fighting indefinitely.
The Ghost Budget also weakened the main lever through which Congress maintains control of a war, namely its control of the purse. The combination of deferred spending, weak oversight, broadening definition of war costs, and readily available supplemental funding relaxed the pressure to maintain budget discipline over military spending. Congress held fewer hearings and presidents made fewer public speeches about the war compared to previous conflicts. And the ready availability of funds for new defense programs encouraged successive administrations to see the world through a “Pentagon lens,” which views military intervention as the default foreign policy option.
The legacy of the Ghost Budget is that money is no longer a serious deterrent to war. To date, 99% of US assistance to Ukraine has been funded by supplemental emergency funds – which means that this spending is in addition to the $840 billion regular defense budget. The Biden administration has asked Congress to approve another $106 billion in emergency funding for the Middle East, Ukraine, and other regions. Regardless of the merits of any particular endeavor, the use of Ghost Budgets makes it far easier to prolong the fighting at any cost.
Just Security Editor’s Note: This article is part of our Ending Perpetual War Symposium. The article derives from a chapter in Brianna Rosen, ed., Perpetual War and International Law: Legacies of the War on Terror (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2024).
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Nonviolent Rebellion Is the Way off the Hamster Wheel of War
Where is the wisdom in doing the same murderous thing again and again, each time expecting a different outcome?
Nov 29, 2023
When I was in my early 20s, I seriously considered murdering someone. He had given my best friend genital herpes, which many health practitioners then believed was the agent responsible for causing cervical cancer in women. (It wasn’t.)
Back in the 1970s, though, I believed that, by infecting my friend, he might have set in motion a process that would someday kill her. That he was an arrogant jerk made it that much easier for me to contemplate murdering him. But there was a larger context to my private dream of revenge. My anger was also fed by a growing awareness that so many of us were just then acquiring of the history of systematic patriarchal threats to, and constraints on, the lives of women. And in those heady days of second-wave radical feminism, I could imagine killing that man as a legitimate response, however brutal, to the male violence that seemed to surround me, and as part of a larger uprising of women.
Lest you think that my sense of systemic, state-supported male violence was nothing more than a fever dream of the times, remember that, in the 1970s, domestic violence was still often treated as a predictably normal possibility in marriage. Men’s white sleeveless T-shirts were known as “wife-beaters” and, on reruns of The Honeymooners, I could still watch comedian Jackie Gleason threaten to use his fist to send his wife Alice “to the moon.” Oh, and should you think that everything has changed since then, today, more than half a century after my murderous daydreaming, the Supreme Court is considering a case that could overturn a federal law prohibiting someone from buying a gun while still under a domestic-violence restraining order.
My murderous intentions then might serve as a miniature version of President George W. Bush’s epistemic certainty in 2003 that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
When I remember what I considered doing at the time, however, I’m now horrified. Even then, I was an antiwar activist, a proponent of nonviolent action against the still-ongoing American war in Vietnam and in the struggle for Black rights here at home. But truly grasping the level of woman-hatred then drove me a little crazy and gave me the urge to fight back in kind.
Epistemic Certainty and War
Was I overreacting to the idea of my friend getting a sexually transmitted disease? Of course I was, especially by trusting so completely my “knowledge” about the connection between herpes and cervical cancer. In fact, what I “knew” would prove dead wrong decades later. Indeed, I didn’t even know (with what a philosopher might call “epistemic certainty“) that my friend had gotten herpes from that particular guy in the first place. But someone gave it to her, and someone, I thought, should pay.
My murderous intentions then might serve as a miniature version of President George W. Bush’s epistemic certainty in 2003 that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. (It didn’t.) Did Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, truly believe in those weapons of mass destruction? My guess is that they just wanted to invade Iraq and didn’t care one way or the other. Nonetheless, enough people in this country did believe in them—including that illustrious flagship newspaper The New York Times—for the invasion to take place with the support of a majority of Americans.
According to the Iraq Body Count project, at least 300,000 people would die in that war, a substantial majority of them civilians. Brown University’s Costs of War Project has tallied up the human costs of all of America’s post-9/11 wars of revenge and found that “at least 940,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. The number of people who have been wounded or have fallen ill as a result of the conflicts is far higher.”
Millions more, Costs of War’s research suggests, were killed indirectly through economic collapse, the disruption of public services and health systems, and environmental contamination. And 38 million people were displaced from their homes thanks to Washington’s post-9/11 “Global War on Terror.” That’s about 1,300 people made homeless for each of the almost 3,000 who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Those 9/11 attacks were a hideous crime. But none of the 19 men directly responsible for them were citizens of any of the countries against which the United States launched its wars of reprisal. (Fifteen were Saudis, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one was Egyptian, and one Lebanese.) Still, it didn’t matter to the people of this country. Someone had killed almost 3,000 of us that day, so someone had to pay.
Horror from Gaza, Horror in Gaza
On October 7, 2023, as the world watched in horror, the military wing of Hamas launched a surprise attack from Gaza, murdering about 1,200 people, most of them Israelis, most of them civilians, significant numbers of them children. They kidnapped as many as 240 others, a few of whom have since died and a few of whom have been released. I must admit that I’m glad my father, raised as an Orthodox Jew in this country, didn’t live to see that day.
Like the U.S. in 2001, Israel has now launched its war of reprisal. The announced goal is the complete destruction of Hamas, which, whether achievable or not, now seems to entail the destruction of much of Gaza itself.
More than 12,000 people, nearly half of them children, have already been killed as of this writing. Half the population—over a million people—have been forcibly displaced from the northern to the southern part of Gaza, supposedly to avoid a crushing aerial war. Meanwhile, an estimated 45% of all housing units in the north have been damaged or destroyed. On November 16, however, Israel began warning people in Khan Younis, a town in southern Gaza, that they would have to move again, as its ground war continued to expand.
Modern wars almost always kill more civilians than combatants, especially when collateral effects like the destruction of infrastructure are taken into account, and they rarely achieve their stated objectives.
To understand what this means, it’s helpful to look at a map of the area. It’s called the Gaza “Strip” because it’s a roughly rectangular little strip of land, less than 25 miles long and 10 miles wide at its widest point. Yet it houses 2.2 million people (half of whom are 18 or younger). It’s surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea on the west, Egypt to the south, and Israel on the east and north. Because most Gazans can never leave and communication with the rest of the world has largely been controlled by Israel, it has been described as the world’s largest open-air prison.
Epistemic Certainty (and Bombs) Strike Again
Despite the fact that international humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions, absolutely forbids attacks on medical facilities in wartime, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched repeated raids on a number of hospitals and health centers, including the Al-Shifa Hospital, a sprawling medical center in northern Gaza. Here we encounter another instance of how epistemic certainty is used to justify wars and their inevitable collateral damage. In this case, the Israeli government maintained that Al-Shifa sat atop a major Hamas command-and-control center, part of a network of underground tunnels. Just as certainty about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction justified American crimes in those post-9/11 wars, certainty about a command center that may well turn out not to exist justified attacks on one of northern Gaza’s last functioning hospitals.
There’s no need to further catalog the horrors of this war here. The world’s media has done little else for the last month and a half. Meanwhile, wars continue elsewhere: an ongoing conflict in Sudan has killed thousands and displaced millions to almost no notice in the U.S. media; Europe is living through a World War I-style conflict in Ukraine, where Russian and Ukrainian armies continue to chew through the lives of thousands of soldiers to advance a few yards in one direction or the other.
War Works—for the Weapons Companies
“War! What is it good for?”
That’s the question the Motown group the Temptations asked back in 1968. Their answer, as people my age will remember, was: “Absolutely nothing!” Modern wars almost always kill more civilians than combatants, especially when collateral effects like the destruction of infrastructure are taken into account, and they rarely achieve their stated objectives.
And yet, today’s wars are regularly fought because people believe war is the best, often the only method of protecting innocent people from violent death. Collective human experience would seem to suggest the opposite. As a means of preventing death, war really does leave something to be desired. Even if you’re willing to treat the deaths of enemy civilians as a “necessary” price to pay for your own people’s survival, history suggests that, in the long run, those deaths won’t protect you. Unless the IDF is prepared to kill everyone in Gaza, it’s unlikely that those who live through the present nightmare will come out of it with less desire to kill Israelis than they had before it started.
It turns out, however, that wars—big and small—are good for something: enriching the corporations that manufacture weapons. As the Los Angeles Timesreported in September, the war in Ukraine has been a boon to weapons manufacturers, especially in the United States:
Weapons companies are seeing their shares rise on the stock market to their best level in years, with indexes for the defense sector outperforming those tracking the broader market by a wide margin… The combat in Ukraine, now in its second year, has jacked [up] the global arms trade, fueling a new appetite for matériel not just in Moscow and Kyiv but also around the world as nations gird themselves for possible confrontations. The war has rocked long-standing relationships within the weapons industry, rejiggered the calculations of who sells what to whom and changed customers’ tastes in what they want in their arsenal.
One example of this realignment: Israel and the United Arab Emirates have started a joint weapons development project. European governments, too, from the United Kingdom to Germany, have raised their weapons-production game, with Germany pledging to spend $100 billion to re-equip its armed forces in the next few years.
Now, Ukraine seeks to kill two birds (and a lot of people) with one stone, by partnering with U.S. companies to turn the country into what The Associated Presscalls a “weapons hub for the west.” As the Ukrainian Minister for Strategic Industries Oleksandr Kamyshin told the AP, “We’re really focusing on making Ukraine the arsenal of the free world.”
War may not be healthy for children and other living things, but it’s great for the arms industry.
Is There No Alternative?
Why, when war so rarely seems to achieve its stated aims, are the people who seek alternatives to it invariably considered naïve or stupid? Where is the wisdom in doing the same murderous thing again and again, each time expecting a different outcome?
War, we are told, is necessary because there is no legitimate alternative. Refusal to use violence when you’ve been attacked or when you live under a regime of grinding oppression is at best stupidity and at worst cowardice. Yet for decades, as journalist Peter Beinart wrote eloquently in The New York Times after the October 7 attacks, Palestinians, who are neither stupid nor cowards, have done precisely that—employing time-honored strategies like the 2018 March of Return, a series of massive peaceful demonstrations at the Israeli wall surrounding Gaza. In the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS, Palestinians have adopted a method once employed by the African National Congress to bring pressure on South Africa’s apartheid regime. As a senator, Joe Biden voted for sanctions on South Africa, but as president, he’s condemned the BDS movement as “too often veer[ing] into antisemitism.”
In Israel/Palestine, it turns out there is an alternative to war, indeed more than one. It’s not easy or safe, however. The Israeli organization Standing Together, for example, unites Palestinians and Jews in concrete work, like running a bilingual hotline for people affected by violence or racism, in an effort to bypass what they see as the stagnation miring both major NGOs and the leftist parties in Israel. In the wake of the October 7 attack, they wrote to their supporters:
After over a month in this horrific reality, the feelings of despair are starting to creep up on everyone. It’s in moments like these that solidarity and hope are more important than ever. If we let despair win, we lose our ability to act, and if we don’t act, we won’t have an impact on our reality. We know that, in these incredibly difficult times, we must continue to act—by strengthening the partnership between Jews and Palestinians—and working together to start to think about what happens the day after this deadly war ends, and what kind of society we want to build.
Standing Together is not alone in seeking another way. One of those killed by Hamas was peace activist Vivian Silver, who spent her life building connections between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis. She served on the board of B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, and routinely drove Gazans in her car to healthcare appointments in Israel. In her newsletter, her friend Dana Mills, a former director of the Israeli group Peace Now, wrote that “the only way to avenge this horrific loss of Vivian’s life” is to continue to support her demand for justice and peace for everyone “between the river and the sea.”
That response to Silver’s death continues the tradition of nonviolent action as the only possible means of interrupting a deadly cycle of revenge and counter-revenge.
In her essay “On Revolution and Equilibrium,” written at the height of the Black Power movement, the nonviolent activist Barbara Deming addressed a number of critiques of nonviolent action by her comrades. Far from being a coward’s way out, Deming argued, nonviolence in response to aggression is so difficult precisely because it’s so dangerous. On the other hand, nonviolence doesn’t condemn your own side to mass suicide. Take the long view, the one that might extend beyond our own personal deaths, and you’ll see that eventually those who oppose violent oppression with nonviolent obstruction will take fewer casualties than those who choose armed struggle. Eventually (though never soon enough), we’ll wear out the opposition. Yes, some of us will certainly die in the process, because we face real violence. But we’re already dying. The only question is how to prevent more death.
As Deming wrote,
In nonviolent struggle, the violence used against one may mount for a while (indeed, if one is bold in one’s rebellion, it is bound to do so), but the escalation is no longer automatic; with the refusal of one side to retaliate, the mainspring of the automation has been snapped and one can count on reaching a point where de-escalation begins. One can count, that is, in the long run, on receiving far fewer casualties.
I am glad that I encountered this tradition of vigorous nonviolent struggle back when I was in the grip of that murderous rage. It convinced me that I could take more effective action against the systems that demeaned and constrained me than any of my nightmare dreams of violent revenge could offer. The longer I live, the surer I become that, in a world filled with deadly armed struggles, nonviolent rebellion is the only way off the hamster wheel of war.
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